One of the things that has emerged from the USA scandal is that many high-level administration figures have been using common consumer email and messaging services such as those of Blackberry and AOL for communications that include official business. This was done expressly to evade subpoenas. There has been some debate about whether this is even legal, but I have no insight into that, so I’ll leave that question aside. The fact is that any high-level executive branch electronic communications that take place outside of trusted systems can seriously threaten to expose classified matters to hostile forces. After all, the fate of Valerie Plame has made clear that this administration is, in the most generous possible interpretation (more generous than is really sustainable), careless with vital national secrets. Congress should therefore subpoena all email, IM, cell phone texting, and other electronic communications from high-level executive branch staff since the beginning of the Bush administration that has gone outside of trusted carriers.
The US government has elaborate procedures to protect the security of communications, and enforces these by requiring all sensitive or potentially sensitive communications to take place on what are called “trusted” systems. These are systems that have been certified by the NSA as meeting well-defined security standards that the NSA itself spells out in its various “color books”. Companies like AOL and Blackberry, at least in their common consumer manifestations, are not examples of trusted systems. There is a serious danger that internal communications could have been intercepted by terrorists, a hostile foreign power, or rogue forces willing to sell information to either of these.
The only way to check this, however, is to have all the communications inspected. It all must be evaluated for security leaks, but there is no easy global search, as we are not searching for any specific matter, but rather for anything that might be a violation.
This is going to be very hard-to-do with millions of pages of emails, and will not be finished quickly, probably not during this administration, but the work must start. A document dump on the Internet, though it would be an effective way to carve through the material more quickly, has to be ruled out precisely because of the potentially sensitive nature of the data. The Congress will have to create a task force of people with the appropriate clearance to direct the examination. The first step will, I imagine, simply be searching for keywords, possibly in conjunction with context info, such as key dates. For example, what was said about the intelligence case for WMD’s in Iraq while that case was being made? What was said in response to the various warnings of imminent terrorist attack before 9/11? What was said over unsecured channels about warrantless wiretapping and extraordinary rendition? Any such conversations could have serious national security implications and could have involved the exposure of classified information.
The Republicans and the MSM will no doubt scream that this is the “mother of all fishing expeditions” , “the witch hunt to end all witch hunts” and suchlike blather. But how else can the security of our communications be verified? Does national security matter or doesn’t it?
The subpoenas should go in three directions. 1) To the people with the accounts themselves, who should be required, first of all, to identify all accounts that they may have used for official communications during this period. 2) To the various providers they have used. This provides a useful secondary check on what comes from the parties, as well as offering some recovery for genuinely lost data. 3) The NSA. Since it evidently has been monitoring electronic communications extensively, it may well have a great deal of this material. The potential for the NSA to use its wiretapping powers to engage in political surveillance of the Watergate variety, is, of course, one of the potential problems of the monitoring. It will be very helpful to know how much of this has been going on.
To counter accusations of partisanship, a bipartisan commission should be established to direct the search through the emails and such. This should be bipartisan in the same way the Baker/Hamilton commission was, where the Democrats were represented by centrists well-liked by Republicans, such as Lee Hamilton, who did much to minimize the damage to Republicans from Iran/Contra by explicitly refusing to investigate Reagan or Bush 1 “for the good of the country”. Yes, it can be bipartisan, but we will choose the Republicans. Linc Chaffee might be a good bet.
